Silver

18

Orla didn’t check into the junior suite at the Dan Tel Aviv.

There was something about the offer that just didn’t sit right with her. She couldn’t put her finger on why it felt off, but try as she might she couldn’t imagine a British spy-master being so considerate or so extravagant. That was enough for her.

Instead she crossed the port and used her “flexible friend” to check into the Dan Panorama.

She had no luggage, but the porter insisted on accompanying her all the way to the room, then held his hand out expectantly. She tipped the guy, apologizing that she didn’t have any local currency. He assured her it wasn’t a problem. The air conditioning was on, and the TV screen welcomed her to the Dan Panorama and hoped she enjoyed her stay. The wide windows looked out over the crystal blue water. The balcony door was half open and inviting. She went out onto it and stood there for a full five minutes, hands braced on the balcony rail, just drinking in the incredible view.

The suite itself was three rooms, a lounge area with two small couches arranged around the flat screen TV and a coffee table. A varied selection of magazines from Business Today to Architectural Monthly, What Photo? and Harper’s were fanned out across the coffee table, light reading for every possible palette. A luxurious robe hung on the back of the door. She ran a hand over its thick plush. Behind the couches was a nicely proportioned dining area. On the table there was a full bowl of fruit stacked high with everything from apples, oranges and grapes to kiwi fruits, guava and papaya. The cooler was stocked with miniature bottles of champagne, San Pellegrino, orange juice, Absolut Vodka, a decent half-bottle of both red and white wine, the usual bags of nuts and enough chocolate for even the sweetest tooth.

She pulled her blouse off, glad to feel the air on her skin, and threw it onto the nearest of the two couches.

She rooted around inside her bag for her cell phone and called in. It was a short conversation; she updated Lethe on what she had unearthed, which, when it came to spelling it out, was very little. The Disciples of Judas, that name again, Mabus, a history lesson and a lot of dead ends. Gavrel Schnur hadn’t said anything about Masada or why the real Akim Caspi had been murdered. She hoped the truth was inside the Mabus dossier, but somehow she didn’t thint was. Truth was an alien concept in this city.

She hung up on Lethe and went through to the bedroom.

It was like something out of A Thousand and One Nights. The bed was covered in sumptuous silks and piled with a dozen pillows. The furniture was rich, black wood, handcrafted with incredible detail. It looked more like a rich man’s brothel than a hotel room.

She put the dossier down on the nightstand, kicked off her shoes, pushed away more than half of the pillows, and lay back on the huge bed.

The mattress fashioned itself to her shape, cocooning her in its soft embrace. A ceiling fan rotated lazily in the heat. Unlike a cheap motel where the fan would have driven her insane with its irritating background groans, this one was oiled precision. She couldn’t rest. She felt itchy in her own skin. After two minutes lying on her back she pushed herself up off the bed. She felt exhaustion sweeping up to meet her thoughts, but she didn’t want to sleep yet. She needed to think. She went through to the bathroom and started to run a bath instead.

Orla set the lights down low and emptied an expensive bottle of bath salts and luxury foam into the water, swirling it around with her hand until it started to bubble up. On the way back out of the bathroom she set the air conditioning to bring the temperature down to a comfortable 68.

In the bedroom she stripped out of her clothes. They smelled like she had been wearing them for two thousand miles. Naked, she stretched, bending her back supine and cracking the vertebrae by leaning first left and then right. She walked across the room to the phone and made arrangements for the maid service to collect her clothes and have them laundered and ready for the morning.

On the wall in the bedroom, there was a motion-sensitive Bang and Olufsen surround sound system. Orla waved her arm across the onyx face, amazed at the luxury money could buy, and the case opened up. The hotel room was better equipped than her entire flat. It ought to have been for the best part of a thousand bucks for the night. Schnur had been right about one thing, sometimes a girl did want a bit of pampering. Inside the surround system, instead of a CD player there was a four-inch touchscreen that listed the various genres preloaded onto the rig. She set it on ’80s shuffle, adjusted the volume and set the speakers to the bathroom, and went back through to the bath. The bubbles in the water were close to overflowing and the mirrors were blind with steam. She turned off the taps, moved the largest of the towels to within reaching distance of the tub, and sank into the suds.

la closed her eyes and savored the stinging heat on her bare skin.

Haircut 100 sang “Fantastic Day” to her through the small speakers set into the tiled wall on either side of the fogged mirror. It didn’t feel fantastic, unless the meaning of the word had been changed to never-ending. She let the water wash over her, cleansing her skin. The tiredness threatened to take her under. She scooped up a handful of suds and massaged them into her arms. She slid down so the water rose up over her face, holding her breath while she counted to twenty in her head, then came up, shaking the suds out of her hair like a dog. She popped her ears, working the water out of them with her little finger. Then she soaped herself thoroughly, just enjoying the feel of the lather forming on her skin. Again she submerged, letting the water rinse her clean. When she came up again the song had changed. Duran Duran were “Hungry Like The Wolf.”

Then she heard someone moving about in the other room. Her first instinct was panic. She knew she had locked the door. But then she remembered the laundry. The maid service had master keys. She shouted above the music, “The clothes are on the bed!”

She lathered shampoo in her hands, then worked it into her hair, massaging it in all the way down to the roots, then slipped beneath the surface again. She worked her fingers through her hair over and over while she held her breath. The lather formed a film on across the surface. She came back up for breath, then submerged again.

Something had been bothering her ever since she left the toad’s office. It wasn’t just that he’d taken the liberty of booking her a room in the Dan Tel Aviv. That could have been old-fashioned human kindness. It was something else. She couldn’t say what it was, just that something, some nagging doubt, chipped away at the back of her mind. Something he had said or something he hadn’t. She rose to the surface again, letting the breath leak out of her mouth and nose. She inhaled and exhaled five times, slowly, then went under again. It was like one of those elaborate finger puzzles that had been popular when she was younger, where you put your fingers in at either end, and the harder you tried to pull them out, the more stubbornly the trap clung to them. She worried away at it, but her mind refused to make the connection.

Then it hit her: how could Gavrel Schnur know so much about this Mabus character? He was good, but was he that good? Was it possible? Schnur had said that even those recruited to the Shrieks were limited in their knowledge. They only knew two others within the entire terror cell-the man who recruited him and the man he recruited. Schnur had looked at the photograph of Solomon-only Solomon, he hadn’t even given the man a second name-and recognized him. Had he simply fed her the lines about Mabus and his terrors, she might have believed it; after all they knew about Mabus. His name had come up again and again, but they didn’t have a face to put to the name. He was a ghost. Like the toad had said, that was how he worked. No one knew who he was, not the real man behind the codename.

She shook her head at her own stupidity. She thought she had been so clever, holding out on the toad. She had been so preoccupied with not letting on what she knew she hadn’t listened to what he was saying. That the toad recognized Solomon as Mabus meant he had to be the man above or the man below in the food chain. There was no other way he could know him. He’d told her as much when he said he sympathized with their cause. He’d outlined their beliefs in detail. He’d even put a silver shekel on the table between them. Judas had supposedly been bought with Tyrian shekels.

“I am an idiot!”

He hadn’t just taken the liberty of booking her a room, he’d tried to put her somewhere where he would be able to find her when he needed to. A hotel room was more comfortable than the average cell, but that’s exactly what it would have been.

Orla decided to get out of the bath.

As her head broached the surface she saw a masked face leaning down over her. Leather gloves fastened around her throat and pushed her under the water. She lashed out, kicking and flailing and swallowing water as she tried to scream. As she felt the fight draining out of her body the masked man hauled her up out of the water and slapped her across the face, forcing her to breathe. She coughed up a lungful of water. Without a word he pushed her back under the water. She tried to grab his wrists and pull them away from her throat, but he was too strong. She splashed up water, kicking frantically. She slapped at the surface, spraying bubbles, then slipped down the length of the tub. Her head hit the bottom.

Orla opened her mouth to scream for help instinctively and choked again as her mouth filled with soapy water.

She slapped helplessly at the side of the tub, trying to reach something, anything.

The masked man hauled her up again. She coughed water, spluttering and trying to see through stinging eyes. She couldn’t focus on anything in the room. There was steam, and in the steam there were shadows, blurs. She could have been seeing three masked men or one.

“Were you really stupid enough to think you could hide from us anywhere in this city?” She didn’t recognize the voice. The accent was thick, heavy, but that could have been the water and the fear distorting what she heard.

She was helpless. She was naked. She reached up for the man’s face. She wanted to see him. Her fingers barely touched the wool of his balaclava before he grabbed her wrist and twisted, using his grip on her wrist to push her under the water again. As she went down she heard someone behind him say, “Don’t break her.”

She tried to push her head back above the water. She couldn’t. The masked man reached down, his hand closing around her throat, and kept her under.

“The boss wants the bitch alive.”

She knew that voice.

She knew it because she’d been listening to it all day.

She knew it because she had been stupid enough to trust it.

Uzzi Sokol.

The toad’s man.